When to remove pinkies

Hello

I have a female corn snake which has just been mated with my male, I also have breeding mice what is the best thing to do with my next litter of pinkies do I leave them to grow up and feed the snakes or do I take them out a couple of days old in case my snake does have babies and then I will have some stock of pinkies for them.

Your snake won't surprise you with babies - either you're breeding them and incubating the eggs, or you're not - so only you can really tell us what size mice you need. How many mice do you have for breeding? How many mice do you have in the freezer already?

I take some pinkies out of the nests (normally at around 12-18 hours old once they've had their first feeds) for baby season, and I leave some to grow on for my adults.

Mice have (approx) one litter every four weeks, so if you need two adult mice a week to feed the adult snakes then you'll need to let her raise eight babies from each litter, to grow on for adult food. That means if she has more than eight pinks in a litter, you can cull the rest of them to stockpile for if/when you have eggs incubate. You also need to factor in growing on extra adults for replacing your breeders as they grow older and less fertile.

new pinkies

currently I have two cages one has 3 females and 1 male and they have a litter of fuzzies at the moment and the other cage is 1 male and 1 female they have only been together for 10 days so far.

All the other mice we have only had for about a month as they were given to us with the snake when we bought it.

At the moment we are having to buy live mice each week to feed the snakes as we have not found a supplier yet of frozen where we live in Spain and we only have 2 snakes.

1 male six females thats the best way paul

I've found that if you take all their babies every time they have a litter, the mice will never learn "parenting skills" and turn into baby eaters. For a new colony I let them keep all of the babies in their first litter and don't disturb them. Once they have had a litter or two I start culling, but usually leave a couple of babies each time for them to raise. I like to let them nurse a little before taking them as the milk bellies provide a bit of extra nutrition to the snakes. I'm never going to keep so many mice that it would produce the amount of pinkies I'd need here, so I order the bulk of my pinkies as frozen online and stockpile what my own mice produce as well. This year I have 2 colonies, a 1.4 and a 1.3, in 10 gallon tanks. It really also depends what kind of mice you have and how big their litters are, the white ones bred for labs are supposed to have larger litters but are a little too boring for me so I like to get the fancy ones and play around with their genetics a bit.

i would be careful, and certainly would never take the whole litter as pinkies, this can cause problems, forgot the full name for the condition, but the mother mouse still produces milk, and it doesnt get used, if she does get this condition it can kill them. i have about 20 breeding pairs, and 10 breeding trio's, i dont think you can accuratly calculate things so that you are always stocked, you have to accomadate for escapees (not often, but it happens) deaths, older mice, eaten litters etc. all the mice i breed still dont supply enough to feed all my snakes (although i do sell a lot of mice as pets, breeders and feeders)

i would cut down the litter sizes, take maximum half the litter away from her as pinks, this will also help the remaining mice grow faster, and stronger as they will be getting more milk and nutrients

hope this helped
lee